Chapter 5. First Blood (2)

And you are standing on her lawn, which is rude, and also you brought a sword to a public university, which, I promise you, the actual human authorities would have Opinions about. Lynn?""Yeah?""Behind me now, if you'd be so kind."She didn't need to be told twice. She slid to his side, Zoey hauled along by the wrist, and for the first time in her life Lynn Moore fought something with someone watching her back.It was ugly. That was the thing she would remember. It was not elegant. The Covenant's books made guardians sound like angels, and vampires sound like predators in slow motion, and the truth was that fighting was clumsy and wet and full of swear words.Kael moved like water going the wrong way through a storm. Thorne's silver blade could not touch him — every time it came close, the dark absorbed it, black ice racing up the steel — but Thorne knew vampire tricks. He'd been trained on them. He twisted, and a flare of blessed light from his free hand caught Kael across the chest, and Kael grunted and went down to one knee.The silver burned him. Lynn saw it. She saw the black mark on his coat, the way his hand went to his ribs, and something in her chest went very quiet and very hot."Kael—""I'm fine.""You're not fine, he burned you—""Lynn." His red eyes found hers. Steady. Even through the pain. "Fight."So she fought.She had never fought like this. At Powell she'd been a firehose pointed at a monster. Here, she was a firehose pointed at a man, and she had to be careful, and she couldn't be careful, because he'd hurt the only person who had ever shown up, and the gold light in her chest blew open like a dam breaking.She hit him with a wave of pure light. Not a shield. Not a rope. A wall of it, bright enough that the whole quad went white, and Thorne raised his arm against it, and the silver sword went flying across the concrete, and he stumbled back.But it was too much. She could feel it. The Recoil was already climbing her throat, iron and fire, and the light was still pouring out, and she could not make it stop. Her nose started bleeding. Her knees shook. The gold kept rising, higher than she'd ever pushed it, brighter, and somewhere under the gold she could hear something else breathing. Something old. Something that lived under the city and liked what it was seeing.Lynn.It was a voice. It was in her head. It was not nice.More."Stop," she said, out loud, to nobody. "Stop, I can't —""LYNN."Kael's hand closed around hers.The contact was winter glass, cold and certain, and the second his fingers locked with hers the gold light didn't stop, but it steadied. It stopped shaking. The thing in her head receded like a tide pulling back, and she could breathe again. She looked down.

Their hands were clasped, gold light and shadow, and where they touched, the two lights didn't fight. They didn't mix. They balanced, gold and black, like two poles of one thing.Thorne, on his knees across the quad, stared at the joined hands with a face that had finally lost its training."What…" he whispered. "That's not — the books say light burns dark. The books say—""The books," Kael said, and he was standing, and his hand hadn't let go of hers, "were written by people who lied to you. Same as they lied to her. Same as they lied to your dead friends."He stepped forward. One hand still holding Lynn's. The other rising, shadow coiling."Shepherd Thorne," he said, very quiet, "you came to my tenant's campus, at dusk, with a sword, and you hurt her friend. You have exactly one moment to tell me who sent you before I decide you're a permanent part of this lawn."Thorne looked at him. Looked at Lynn. Looked at the light and dark between their hands, and something in the man broke. It wasn't courage. It was the opposite. It was relief."The Primate sent me," he said. Fast. Like it was a confession. "Not to kill you. To test you. To see if the light and the dark would touch. We were told the anchor was contaminated. We were told the vampires had turned you." He coughed, and there was blood in it, and Lynn realized the wave of light had hurt him worse than she knew. "But they're not enemies. The Primate and the Conclave. They've never been enemies."Lynn went cold."What did you say?"Thorne smiled. It was a dying man's smile, wet and awful. He was going to die here, and he knew it, and he was going to spend his last breath telling her the thing that would break her."The Primate and the Conclave…" he whispered. His eyes were losing focus. "They're not enemies. They're partners. They've always been partners. The war… it's a show, girl. It's a show for the children. The guardians and the blood kin… they're both just… inventory…"His head fell back. His hand went limp.Captain Thorne was dead on the quad grass, and the fog swallowed him, and the whole world was very quiet.Zoey was sitting in the grass behind them, white as paper, clutching her phone to her chest. There was a cut on her forearm from when the shield broke — a shallow thing, bleeding slow.Lynn went to her knees beside her."Zoey. Zoey, I'm so sorry, that's my blood, that's not yours, let me —"She reached out without thinking, and the gold light came with her hand, soft and small, and settled over the cut. It closed. Not vanished — it left a faint pink line — but the bleeding stopped, and Zoey stared at her own arm like it had grown a second hand."That," Zoey said, "was definitely not UV gel nail lamp light. That was not. I want to be clear about that.""Zoey—""I'm not mad."

Zoey held up a hand. Her voice was shaking, but her eyes were furious in the way they got when she'd decided to be brave. "I'm not even scared, not yet. I'm going to be so scared later. But right now I'm just… processing that my best friend can close wounds with her hand and that man over there was literally a vampire and I think I've been flirting with the idea of him this whole time without knowing."Kael, across the grass, went very still."I heard that," he said."Good," Zoey said. "You should know. It's been a week."Lynn almost laughed. It came out as a ragged breath that hurt. She put her head against Zoey's shoulder for one second, just one, and let herself be the friend and not the anchor, and then she stood up because the world was not done with them."Zoey," she said. "I need you to go home. Not the dorm. My building. The Voss Building. Third floor. Lock the door, don't answer for anyone but me or him, and delete nothing you just filmed. Do you understand me?""I understand that I am now part of something I did not sign a waiver for." Zoey got to her feet, pocketed the phone, and squared her shoulders. "But I also understand that if I leave you two alone on this quad, one of you is going to get murdered in a historically interesting way. So. New plan. I stand behind you. I film. And when it's over, you owe me the full truth, Lynn Moore, not the college-student nonsense you've been feeding me."Lynn looked at Kael.He gave the tiniest nod. She'd take it.Across the grass, Kael watched Thorne's body dissolve into nothing — the Covenant's doing, a clean vanishing, no evidence, the way they erased all their messes. His face was carved from stone."Partners," Lynn said. She walked over to him, slow, her legs still rubbery. Her voice came out hollow. "He said they're partners. The Covenant and the vampires. You told me the Conclave wants me drained. The Covenant wants me sacrificed. If they're working together —""Then there's no good side." Kael looked at her, and his red eyes were tired. Older than she'd ever seen them. "There never was, Lynn. The lie isn't that one side is good. The lie is that there are two sides at all.""Then who's actually hunting me?""Both of them," he said. "And neither of them. That's the part that should scare you."She sat in the quad grass with her bleeding nose and her wounded best friend and a dead shepherd dissolving in the fog, and for the first time since the sky tore open over Powell, Lynn Moore had absolutely no idea who she was supposed to be running from.Her phone buzzed in her pocket.She looked at it. One new message. Unknown number.She read it once. Read it again. Then she turned the screen toward Kael, and his jaw tightened.The message said: "Well done, child. You've passed the first test.

The Rite is no longer optional. Come home by Sunday. The Primate expects to meet his new Anchor face to face. And Lynn? Don't bring the vampire. He won't like what he sees."